[TUHS] copyright, was History of cal(1)?

[Warner Losh via TUHS]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2025 at 7:06 PM John Levine <johnl at taugh.com> wrote:

> It appears that Warner Losh via TUHS <imp at bsdimp.com> said:
> >threw a lot of monkey wrenches into things. The 1980 Copyright act changed
> >a lot of things. Prior to that, you could not copyright software *AT*ALL*.
>
> I'm sorry, but that gets the history wrong.
>

Thanks for the update. I was confusing different dates...


> The last major update to US copyright law was in 1976, with a minor update
> in
> 1980. We didn't join Berne until much later in 1989. While Berne affected
> a lot
> of aspects of copyright, like whether works need a notice (not any more)
> or how
> long it lasts (too long) it had no effect on software.
>

Yea, the notice part is why AT&T likely lost copyright to V32 that Berkeley
based 3BSD on...  I was confusing that with not being able to have it at
all... But without it, the AT&T IP protection fell back to Trade Secret
which was in doubt due to the 1974 CACM article.


> You are correct in that until the mid 1960s everyone assumed that software
> was
> not eligible for copyright under the 1879 Baker vs. Selden decision that
> accounting forms weren't eligible since they were just instructions about
> how to
> do something. John Banzhaf registered the first software copyrights in
> 1964, to
> test that assumption.  For a while it was unclear whether they were
> enforcable.
>
> In 1974 Congress set up CONTU to study copyright issues, which were mostly
> implemented in the 1976. There were a few left-overs addressed in 1980
> which
> added computer software to the list of things explicitly allowed, although
> by then everyone had assumed it was implicitly included.
>

Yea. That's some of the history that I Iived through. My first job in 1976
was definitely operating under the assumption that copyright couldn't
happen.


> So anyway, if AT&T had wanted to use copyright to protect Unix in the
> 1970s they
> could have.  I expect they chose trade secret because copyright lawsuits
> are
> incredibly expensive and trade secret is a lot easier to enforce, at least
> if
> the secrets haven't leaked.
>

Here history is kinda complex. They sometimes had copyright
notices included, and removed sometimes due to the 'no support at all'
nature of the licenses (Clem can fill in the details). It was this
sloppiness that led to the v.32 tapes going out w/o copyrights...


> R's,
> John
>
>
>